JoEllen Tamburro, age 15, of Wilmington, Del., for her question:
WHAT LANGUAGES ARE MOST WIDELY SPOKEN?
Indo European languages are the most widely spoken family of languages in the world. Following are the subfamilies of languages that are included: Albanian, Armenian, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indo Iranian, Italic (including the Romance languages), Slavic and two extinct subfamilies, Anatolian (including Hittite) and Tocharian.
About 1.6 billion people speak Indo European languages today.
Proof that these highly diverse languages are members of a single family was largely accumulated during a 50 year period around the turn of the 19th century.
The extensive Sanskrit and ancient Greek literatures (older than those of any other Indo European language except the then undeciphered Hittite) preserved characteristics of the basic Indo European forms and pointed to the existence of a common parent language.
By 1800 the close relationship between Sanskrit, ancient Greek and Latin had been demonstrated. Hindu grammarians had systematically classified the formative elements of their ancient language. To their studies were added extensive grammatical comparisons of European languages.
The early Indo European studies established many principles basic to comparative linguistics. One of the most important of these was the sounds of related languages correspond to one another in predictable ways under specified conditions.
In general the evolution of the Indo European languages displays a progressive decay of inflection. Thus Proto Indo European seen to have been highly inflected, as are ancient languages. In contrast, comparatively modern languages, such as English, French and Persian, have moved toward an analytic system (using prepositional phrases and auxiliary verbs).
Decay of inflection was often a result of the loss of the final syllables of many words over time, therefore, modern Indo European words are often much shorter.
Over the centuries, many languages also developed new forms and grammatical distinctions. Changes in the meaning of individual words have been extensive.
The original meaning of only a limited number of hypothetical Proto Indo European words can be stated with much certainty. Derivatives of these words occur with consistent meanings in most Indo European languages. This small vocabulary suggests a new Stone Age or perhaps an early metal using culture with farmers and domestic animals. The indentity and location of this culture have been the object of much speculation. Archaeological discoveries in the 1960s, however, suggest a strong possibility in the prehistoric Kurgan culture.
Located in the steppes west of the Ural Mountains between 5000 and 3000 B.C., this culture had diffused as far as eastern Europe and northern Iran by about 2000 B.C.